There's Always Something New

Tag Archives: first year

People in academia like to talk. A lot. We like to hear ourselves talk. A lot. But sometimes we need to take a step back and listen. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Sometimes, we need to be smart enough to let our evolution take over.

I was stricken with a delightful head cold last week. Due to the amount of nose blowing I was doing, I wasn’t much for conversation. Mostly because it led to coughing and other delightful cold symptoms. I’d like to write a book about the “8236 stages of a cold” that will be due out for publication next year. Nothing like a good cold. And so much hand washing….

Amidst my mouth breathing and sudafed haze, I still kept my schedule. It was just a cold after all. It was a good reason to speak less and listen more. I was reminded of this several times throughout the week.

Chatting with grad students. While it’s our job to advise them, I know I can get mired in the business at hand: making progress. Not feeling 100% helped me sit back and let them drive the bus of their own learning. In between my coughs and nose blowing, students were able to work through their dissertation issues. Because I didn’t have much for a voice, I mostly nodded in agreement and let them keep talking.

Not talking gives other people permission to keep talking. Not talking makes some people super uncomfortable so they keep talking. Not talking and being with someone who fears silence is an excellent tactic in getting all of their secrets out. Just so you know.

Our department also hosted preview days. Potential grad students come in for a series of meetings and interviews spread out over the course of a few days. It’s a great opportunity to meet with potential students, listen to them discuss their future plans, and if our department might be a good fit for that. Along with this comes a lot of listening. Trying to gauge their interest, their maturity level, and their true motive for a graduate degree is a lesson. Paying attention to their body language is equally important.

Sitting back and listening can be a powerful medium. It gives the person you’re with the freedom to converse and it gives you the freedom to listen. No one feels obligated.

Being a new faculty member is hard. It’s tiring. It wears you out and wears on you. I know. I’m there. I come home some days and don’t move from my couch except for food, the bathroom, or to move to my bed and that feels like work. I feel you.

I’d like to make a case for getting out and working after hours, weekends, or getting to know your fellow faculty at social functions that are outside of work hours. I know it’s hard. Many of you will have families and other commitments, but I’m going to encourage you to give it the “old college” try a few times. Hear me out.

I never like making a habit of working on the weekends. However, in this position, I find that if I give myself a few hours on Sunday’s to clear out my inbox, settle my calendar, and get myself organized, I have a much smoother Monday morning ready to jump into whatever I got myself into. Truth.

The awesome part about this is that many of my colleagues like working on the weekends as well. Sunday’s will find many of us in our offices working along quietly playing the never ending game of catch up. Before you get all “misery must love company” on me, the weekends are great for catching up with colleagues. There’s fewer students milling around, there’s no class to rush off too and generally there’s no formal meetings on weekends. Each Sunday I’ve logged has been useful to me in terms of productivity, but it’s also had the added benefit of getting time to converse with my colleagues. We don’t always discuss work, but we do talk. And, as the newest faculty member in the department, I think it’s important to have those conversations to set some context.

For me, it’s valuable time spent. As a self-identified introvert, I don’t do as well in large groups, faculty meetings are too busy with business for any chit chat, and walking into another faculty member’s office to strike up a conversation isn’t my forte. In fact, the last one makes me downright uncomfortable. The weekend is when the feeling is a little less formal, standing around for a few minutes chatting helps me get to know my peers and them get to know me. I’m “work new faculty” at work. I have things to do and tasks to check off. I’m guilty of not wanting to socialize much and I have a calendar full of things as well. Formal business hours are not the hours you want to get to know me in to get a good picture of who I am.

I’ve been told many times that I’m a hard person to know. I acknowledge that. I think many academics are. We choose academia for the solitude of research sometimes and it feeds our tendencies. Being aware that I’m not the most open, charming, naturally extroverted human helps me work within the boundaries that have been set by my personality.

Our faculty tries to go out to happy hour too. I don’t always want to hit the bar with my colleagues on Friday, but I’ve gone each time it was organized and I felt as though it was valuable time spent. I’ve been able to cultivate talking points as I get to know my colleagues. We rarely discuss work specifically, students and work do come up, but it’s more tangential in nature and non-specific. Again, my personality comes out in these settings since I can speak to people in a more social setting without the fear of students or other hindrances.

Can it be awkward? Of course. Entering an established group of peers is always a little unnerving, but maximizing your personality potential and being self-aware enough to understand how you’re situated in a group can be important. I don’t come out and say how much I love research, but the spouse of my colleague saw me design a course at faculty development this spring. He observed me working for days on it, had conversations with me about the topic, and learned how much I love research and undergraduate students. Because of that positive interaction, my name was brought up to plan a possible undergrad research certificate in our college. That’s pretty exciting to me. I learned this at the bar. I solidified my ability to do this during a hallway conversation on a Sunday. Over half of my interaction about this had nothing to do with M-F from 9-5.

Being the new kid on the block can be tough. It’s hard to know where you fit in the group. It’s kind of like being the last kid picked in gym class in middle school. It’s taken me nine months to order business cards. It’s also taken me nine months to get to know the people I call colleagues better too. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither have my relationships with my peers.

The sound of the clattering keyboard is my favorite. Compared to the sound that I hear when my forehead hits the desk, it’s like music to my ears. Submission season is here! I love working up a manuscript, but only if I get enough time to do it.

Working with graduate students has rewards and challenges. Submission season has caused a small manuscript meltdown from one student this year due to time management. As someone who writes and submits regularly (like all of my colleagues), I cannot help but beg and plead with graduate students to manage their time in order to get timely feedback.

As a young faculty member who happens to love writing and research, I enjoy seeing my students make positive progress. No, you won’t get accepted 100% of the time, but if you’re improving, then you’re moving forward. As a faculty, I always remember to thank my students for their continual hard work. I know it’s a pain. I know it’s not always fun. AT ALL. But, I know why we’re all here. I’m here to help. I’m here to guide. I’m here to comment my face off in your word document in the spirit of improving. I often preface my first round of edits with, “I comment because I care” and I really do. Be worried if you don’t see any comments. Unless we’ve been working on this for a while, I’ve probably lost interest or didn’t give it the time it deserved.

Delegate your time in advance.

Send notes to your collaborators.

Know that it’s going to take much longer than you expected anyway.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help (in a timely fashion).

Follow the submission outline.

Find a submission to the same conference or journal that was accepted and model it.

Edit, edit, and edit it again.

Be explicit in your language in the body. There’s usually not space for flowery innuendo. Be literal. Say what you mean.

Don’t expect help. I hate to be negative nancy on the whole thing, but sometimes, people don’t follow through. Sometimes, people are on your author list but don’t do work. Sometimes, you’re going to have to man/lady up and rock it out.

Understand in advance you can use the writing for something else. If this is ongoing research, you will likely be able to use it for other submissions or articles. Most conferences are moving towards abstracts for acceptance, but there’s still some laggards who want 10+ pages for a 20 minute presentation. I call this a “valuable lesson in patience.”

Understand that growth is what’s most important. You may not get accepted but did you manuscript improve from the previous submission? Becoming a better researcher is a process, it’s something I remind myself of daily. There will be days of frustration and there will be days of sheer triumph. Celebrate whenever you can. It’s always worth a little dance party in your office.

I signed up for a course design workshop this year. I’m teaching a new class in a few weeks and really wanted to give it the time it deserved to plan the darn thing. Yes, deserved. Instead of tossing things around in my brain and trying to spit things back out on paper, I gave myself 2.5 days of time. Our pedagogy shop sponsored the workshop and provided everything from coffee and snacks to lunch to meaningful and useful advice on instructional goals, assessment, and flipping the classroom if we were interested. It sure beat the half-ass approach I took in the fall.

On that note, my teaching survey’s came back. Not bad kids, not bad. Some of the feedback was very odd, some of it made NO sense, but some of it made PERFECT sense. I had been handed a stale class, pumped some life back into it and forgot to update the syllabus and organize things in a more coherent manner. lesson learned. Not all the feedback was bad and many of the comments were valid for positive and negative reasons. As hard as we try, we do take some of it personally. One of my colleagues tanked on the survey and was pretty upset about it. She also attended the course design workshop. Her ATTITUDE was: if I screwed up, I can get better. She spent her 2.5 days thinking about her class for next year already. I admire her tenacity to not let it get ahead of her.

It was an easy decision to go to this workshop. Even with the random pile of stuff that I had to plow through to get ready for the semester, I could not have brought the course to life without the time, space, and permission to do so. I encourage anyone reading this to also seek out those resources at your university. They have the knowledge. They have the time. They will offer suggestions. If you don’t have this luxury, call on your “team” to help you out. This has already made the semester less painful. Now, if all my grants would get funded and manuscripts accepted.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year in the hallways of my office. It’s annual reporting time for all faculty. A grad student swung through, saw one of my computer screens and observed, “almost every faculty I’ve seen today has that on their screen.” Let me tell ya kid, we’re really all in this together.

It’s my first faculty reporting season on this job. It’s a totally different form/page/requirement list than my old job. I was thankful to get a tutorial from a more senior faculty member this week and a crash course provided the broad strokes that I’m going to need to finish mine. There’s one more relatively new faculty member in the department and she and I visited about it a few times as well, making sure that things like “objectives for 2014” were missing for both of us since we never put in objectives last January because we weren’t employed by said department/college. A sense of camaraderie has been nice in that respect. It’s more like, “you struggling?” “yup.” “Oh hey, me too.”

I began this job in May so it’s been about seven months on the job. Needless to say, there are times when it feels like I’ve spent a lot of time working but don’t have a lot to show for it. That’s my self-efficacy monster to wrestle with. Knowing I have a colleague who also feels that way softens the blow a little bit. Neither of us have gone up for any external funding yet. Hell, I just moved into an office around Thanksgiving. Can I report that?

The colleague who was nice enough to give me the tutorial-she also got a tutorial on hers from a tenured member of the department since she’s going up for tenure this year. See how this works? You never know when you’re going to need a good colleague to show you the ropes.

As I work through this first year of the process, I’m humbled by what I have done, by what I haven’t done yet, and by my colleagues. I cannot stress the importance of having good colleagues who are willing to take a few minutes of their day and help me out. Willing to admit they’re struggling or when they’ve figured something out and are willing to show me has been an invaluable asset to me. Small? Yes. Important? Absolutely.

I have continued to be overjoyed to be back in agriculture. I know I’ve discussed it here before but this would NOT have happened in my old appointment. It just wouldn’t have. As much as I know that my job is just my job, it’s also important to me to be happy, to be able to be social, and to feel like an equal member of the faculty. I do feel that way now. It’s not just getting help on my annual report, it’s small things like joining the other faculty for a happy hour, engaging with them over casual conversation, and not worrying that every little thing I might say is being put under a microscope-there’s room for error. HBR ran a piece about how your colleagues should be like good neighbors, willing to lend a hand, a proverbial cup of sugar, but also know you’d reciprocate if ever asked. It just so happens that I brought back some NY goods for one of my colleagues as a kindness. I didn’t have to, but I wanted too. Who doesn’t appreciate good maple syrup? Pancakes for everyone!

If my car broke down on the side of the road and I had to call one of these folks for a ride, I think they would answer the phone AND also come get me if I asked. I hadn’t had that feeling of collegial security since 2011. It feels pretty good.

I had the best intentions in August when syllabi planning. I had my weeks laid out nicely, my readings selected (with the exception of three I added in the latter half of the semester), and gosh darn it, I had my due date calendar up to speed. Delivering an online course means I had to be super organized about things since I’d never actually “see” my students in person, but 100% online.

Inevitably, I made a few mistakes and **gasp** over assigned some work, taking away a few assignments and giving the points to everyone. No one seemed to mind.

As I head to the latter portion of my semester, I’ve accounted for all the things I’d hoped to engage with my students about and I worked hard to design a MANAGEABLE course for ME. Yes, ME. I’ve learned a few things and quickly tried to compensate. I’ve also changed how I do things in many cases to help streamline the process for my students and for me each week.

I front loaded assignments to ensure that all of us (students and instructor alike) would have time to complete the final paper for the course. It has long been a point of discussion to professors everywhere of how to load a course.

I took an “every other” route with this course. There was work due every week, but every other week was a bit lighter in the amount of writing expected and the assignment expectations. One week, a personal reflection would be due of about 500 words and a ‘group chat’ among teams in the course. There would also be a reading and/or another reading or a guest lecture in the form of video or audio. On the opposite week, there would often be an article critique due (1000 words) and sometimes nothing or sometimes a reflection on a documentary pertaining to their chosen industry. With such a broad course topic, my course attracts a wide variety for an audience and it’s important to me as the instructor to try and understand what is important to each student.

I stopped making comments in document (unless there were a LOT) and instead, started emailing students directly with my comments. If there were gross APA, syntax, and grammar errors, I simply said, “this document had more than three errors in the first few paragraphs, please check.”

I set aside one day a week (barring any schedule issues) to grade. In a set amount of time, blocked off my calendar, and didn’t come to campus until it was done.

I tried not to “over grade” or make so many comments/make the email so long, that the student wouldn’t care. Usually a short paragraph, less than three sentences to drive home a point or pose questions. Nothing too verbose. My students all work full time to, they don’t have time to read short novels.

Set clear expectations up front. I told my students what I expected early on. I let them know they’d struggle week one and two and then we’d get into a rhythm. Only a few panicked.

I sent out rubrics to help manage expectations.

I accepted drafts on the final paper during ONE WEEK of a set length for review. I reviewed each one I sent.

I sent a mid-semester survey to give students a voice if they had feedback for me. Only four answered.

What can I work on?

My online organization of the course materials. Some things didn’t get organized as well for every student. Their folders for assignments also got jumbled halfway through the semester and I had to make a folder in each folder. Arrggghhh!

I can’t remember the last time I worked eight hours. I don’t think I can. Eight solid hours of productivity at least. My brain just won’t do it. And neither does yours. Hours of monotonous screen time isn’t natural & forcing yourself to think it is is foolish beyond measure.

Think hard. Challenge yourself. How long are you productive in spurts? How often do you break? Working fewer hours leads to efficiency for me. Are there still some long days? Of course. But rarely are they days of continual work. Breaks, food, meetings, trudging back across campus, those moments all add up.

Accepting I just can’t do long days has helped me be more efficient w my time and maximize my productivity the hours I do work. The Atlantic ran a nice article about the European way of life, taking 31 days off a year and doesn’t that sound glorious? Inside Higher Ed ran a nice post too about maximizing time, minimizing the “busy” game (which we all know I loathe). And then Fast Company came out with a great article about how much time our brains can sustain continual work: 52 min. (average). Validation?

“A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.” Rather, “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

I try to stay on some type of schedule. I realize it’s easier because it’s just me right now in my life, but still, finding anything that resembles work life balance isn’t really a reality for me. I still check email at home and on weekends. I still do personal tasks at work. It’s a gentle push/pull kind of relationship that I’ll always be navigating, always be adjusting depending on my life and my work. I don’t have any notions of this stopping, technology has made us all more fluid in our work. I think the key is knowing when to say no, just like nancy reagan told us in the 80’s.

Grad school guilt left the building some time ago and I’ve tried to quit working on weekends in general. My idea of a good time isn’t working on a manuscript on Saturday. It happens from time-to-time, particularly when a deadline looms, but for the most part, organizing myself on Sunday evening sets me up to be more successful M-F. The idea of down time is luxurious and feels very guilty still, but I’m learning that if I don’t take a break and switch it up, I’m totally useless.

In the age of the “busy contest,” the only people in my life who get to pull that card are my parents who have an additional 150 cows and calves to feed, 500+ acres of land to look after, and the countless other tasks that come with it. They take their down time too. They vacation several times a year, have enough help (which is wonderful) so they can sleep in at least once a week, and are taking day trips to ease the pressure. Simply breaking up the routine can be refreshing as long as the cows are fed and the hay is harvested.

I know the semester is now in full swing and on days when I can, I’m giving myself the gift of going home, swimming laps in the campus pool, and enjoying some more reading when I can that isn’t related to work or research.

You can call me selfish, I’ll call it self care and self preservation. In order to thrive, I’m going to need some down time and so are you.

It’s strange and awesome all at the same time that our social and peer groups can contribute to what decisions you’ll make, how you’ll tackle each day, and what may or may not come out of your brain and mouth in actions.

I’m no stranger to the notion of who we surround ourselves with is who we become. I really struggled with this post grad school when I was still living with a grad student and trying to cross the bridge over to faculty mindset. It was a struggle. It’s still really fun to hang out with grad students, but man, those darn kids…. 😉

I ran across a quick article on HBR and it reminded me of myself and some of my ‘younger’ faculty type friends (I put myself into this category). My friend went to a baby shower (cue Seinfeld, ‘you gotta see the babbbyyyy!!!’) and noted that she met some really cool women who were all mostly faculty and how great it was. It reminded me once again that it can be unbelievably difficult to find a good core group of people. Bad decisions are sometimes a collective bargaining unit that starts as a fun night out but can quickly turn into a ‘what happened?’ moment for everyone. The same can be said for professional decisions. We can all think of someone (like ourselves) who made a poor decision on the job that was influenced negatively by our peer group. The voice in the back of our head is sometimes that of the people we perceive as our equals. Too many of these poorly based decisions begin to add up over time and nothing good comes of it.

I know we’re all marred away into the semester already and so the mere thought of leaving the house for a social activity can be daunting (pants made largely of elastic really ARE a gift) but I encourage you to take a moment to evaluate who you’ve surrounded yourself with. It can be extremely easy to cast those people off as “people i have to work with” and “i don’t really have much of a choice” but I’ll tell you that since switching faculty appointments, my life has gotten so much more pleasant. My hair (which falls out under major stress) has all grown back in (TMI? it’s true and it’s my truth. if you want to gauge my stress level, just look at my head). I didn’t realize how stressed out and cloaked in negative energy I was until some time in August. Seriously, my hair looks really full in front right now, my acne is just about gone, my blood pressure is NORMAL, and I find myself craving sugar and other crap much less.

To play my own devil’s advocate, I know I couldn’t have left my old post without a new one to go to. I understand that we have to ‘stick it out’ sometimes and that our circumstances are all different. I stayed in that job because I LOVED so many things about it. I didn’t realize how bad it was for me and my health until my health improved. I also didn’t realize how stressed out about the people in that old position I was until one of them began emailing me a few weeks ago DEMANDING I do work for him. Thankfully, my academic lady balls were in full force and I had no trouble shutting that down with my velvet hammer. It worked. I was relieved.

As academics, we get stuck. In grad school we get stuck in our research, in thinking out dissertation is going to be this ‘perfect’ thing, in labs and projects with weirdo’s who suck the life out of us. As faculty we often get stuck doing some service that we’re not thrilled with, working with some grad school weirdo’s that have no idea that coming to work is actually a mandatory thing, and so on. I encourage you: faculty and student alike, to evaluate who you’re surrounding yourself with and what you’re becoming as a result. It’s hard to see the forest for the sleaze sometimes. Sometimes we talk ourselves into the whole “it won’t last forever” bit (kind of like grad school) but what can we do in the interim to make it a more bearable experience? It might take detaching (with love of course) from negative forces to start that process and keep the majority of our hair in our heads and our acne at bay.

I’m ever so thankful to have a good group of peers right now. Ones who won’t be afraid to help me “check myself before I wreck myself” but also cheer me on to my own version of success. I hope you have that too.

After a few years on planet earth, you meet some people. You go to college. You meet some people. You move once or twice. You meet some more people. You change jobs/professions. You meet some more people.

Twenty years later: you know quite a few people. Introvert or extrovert, you just meet people!

As a newer faculty member trying to rework a course for fall, I started really thinking about all the people I knew and know. I was looking to supplement my online course with video’s, shorter documentaries, and anything that would serve as a “think tank” piece to get discussion going among the students as a way to engage with them without physically seeing them.

I began drilling down who I knew and what their area of expertise was. As I did this, I was pleasantly surprised by the people who I’d crossed paths in life with and how many I had the good fortune of knowing. These folks came from all parts of my life from a friend from childhood to people I’d worked with during my days with FFA and 4-H, to grad school cohort friends, and current colleagues in my faculty life. The best part was that I still keep in touch with many of these folks. Whether it’s by social media, emails, or actual face-to-face time, keeping these ties open has been important for me on many levels. Sure, I don’t speak to these people as much as I’d like to and see some even less frequently, but it’s nice to know that my parents urge to join clubs, set high goals, and earn my education are paying off even if it did take 15 years to get a ROI from it all.

As a young faculty member or grad student, you’re in the same boat. I cannot stress the importance of networking enough, building professional and personal relationships, and being mindful of what you’re doing and where you’re doing it. I know I’ve written before about being under the microscope all of the time and while being human means making mistakes, it’s important that people see you at your best and sometimes you’re worst.

I don’t know if all of my contacts will say yes to a guest video or audio cast, but it was really nice to be able to reach out to folks, personalize a few lines of an email and then make my request. As I put the finishing touches on this post, I sent out 10 emails and have had seven, yes SEVEN come back and say they’d like to help me out. In stats speak: that’s pretty darn good! It made me see how vast a network I’ve been able to set up and I hope those people feel the same way when they saw my name drop into their inboxes.

As you navigate the first few years of your faculty career, it’s important to reach out to your network to help give you a boost. You know you’ve helped others before and it’s only kind to return the favor. I made sure to ask for a manageable commitment, didn’t get too heavy handed with my request, and set firm expectations for deadlines so I can get things up for my upcoming class. I always tell my students, “you never know when you’ll come across someone in life again,” so make sure you’re representing yourself the way you want to be remembered for the future. The first few years on faculty are fraught with distractions, requests, and time management issues so why not give yourself a break and lean on the folks you can count on? I’m ever so grateful to have seven “yes’s” this evening and was again reminded how wonderful it is to be back in agriculture.

Greetings from the end of summer! I hope you’ve had a chance to rest that brain, renew your research, stretch out those syllabi, and strapped yourself in for what is shaping up to be :

a fall semester

I took my own advice and unplugged for several weeks. Unplugging means only checking email on my phone, opening the laptop fewer than 3 times during a two week stretch, and slinking around the home farm doing agricultural things. Fear not, I spent a day working on the NGSS with some CTE colleagues and other academic things. I also took my cousin out one day. She’s headed off to college in a mere few days and the interaction was a good one. But a puzzling one. Let me explain:

We went to lunch and then did some shopping. I asked her what she thought college was going to ‘be like’ and what she wanted to do with her life. As an 18 year old, it was very idealistic and immature in nature. But, hearing her thoughts got me thinking:

what do 18 year olds think college and real life is supposed to be like?

Her answer:

“i just want to travel” “i think it would be cool to just travel the world” but when asked what she wanted to do she shrugged her shoulders.

When asked what she was majoring in, “i’m going to try English.”

My response,”why just try it? why not go for it.”

And she had no response.

Her family is bearing the burden of tens of thousands in loans and yet she cannot verbally communicate any futuristic desires outside of traveling. No goals have been set. In fact, she hasn’t even pursued her license to drive and she leaves for college in days.

What 18 year old doesn’t love to travel when they don’t have to pay for it? Any trip she’s taken in her short life has been bankrolled by someone else with little or no consequence to her at all, so of course she wants to continue the lifestyle of someone else footing the bill!

As a faculty (new or old), it’s extremely frustrating to have these students walk into class. Yes, they’re all full of energy, they want the experience, they claim they want to “serve” and “give back” but it’s a marginal commitment because they know the moment that life gets rough, they can run home. The moment the real work begins for class, they can call home. If they land a job after graduation and don’t like it, they can move back home. They’ve learned virtually no coping skills or life skills except: HOME.

While I love home like everyone else, no one has pushed these students much and no one has gently nudged them out of their nests of comfort one bit. I love my cousin but her lack of motivation, zero drive for future self, and inability to go beyond the ‘college experience’ frustrated me to no end. I wish she felt as strongly about her education as she did about picking out a new backpack that day.